My Alpha Shamed Me at His Victory Feast, So I Took His Coast novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: I Haul
At the Hall's victory feast Josiah takes Mercy's buoy off the Colors Wall and hangs another woman's; Mercy answers with two words, takes her father's buoy and asks the one man who looked at her to take her down the Airline tonight.
My husband took my buoy down off the wall of his lodge with his own hand, in front of two hundred wolves.
He lifted it by the cord and held it out to me at arm's length.
It was red over white with a black band, chipped down one side.
My father painted those colors on it the week I was born.
Then Josiah Thurston hung Carlene Dow's green-over-yellow buoy on my nail, and the whole lodge began to clap.
It was the night of the victory feast, a year and a day since the fight on the border.
Every long table in the lodge was full.
Above the great hearth hung the hide of the Alpha my husband had beaten.
The head and tail were pinned wide, and the fire lit it from underneath.
That was what they were cheering.
They had cheered it for a year, and I had sat under it for every one of those nights.
Josiah raised both hands, and the lodge went quiet for him.
"Friends, I won't make a long speech," he said. "I've never dressed a thing up."
He smiled at the room, easy and warm.
"A year ago I took a Beal to my wall because the Compact asked it of me."
He nodded toward me.
"She has been a quiet, decent wife to this pack, and I thank her."
Nobody looked at me yet.
"But I love Carlene Dow, and I mean to take her as my Luna. So I put Mercy Beal aside."
There was no gasp.
That is what I remember most.
A few of them studied their plates, and the rest watched me to see what I would do.
"Mercy will keep her room off the kitchen," Josiah said. "Nobody here will put her out. That's the Hall."
Somebody laughed.
Somebody else started the clapping again, and Carlene put her small hand over her mouth and let her eyes fill.
The lodge is called the Hall, and the wall of buoys is the Colors Wall.
Every Luna since 1913 has hung her family's colors there.
They call the fight the Crossing, after the railroad trestle at Vanceboro.
My father and my brother died there, holding the Maine side of the river.
I knew the two answers. Everyone in that lodge knew them.
A put-aside Luna can say nothing, and stay under the roof for life as a guest, fed and not listened to.
Or she can say what a Bay captain says when she pulls her last trap out of bad water.
I was married nine days after I buried my father and my brother.
I had not wept at that wedding. I had not argued with it.
For a year I had stood where I was put, signed what I was handed and eaten at the foot of the table.
No one from the Bay had been let through the Hall's door since.
I stood up from my chair.
The benches scraped, and I walked the whole length of the lodge, past two hundred faces, to the Wall.
Josiah was still holding my buoy.
I took it out of his hand. It weighed less than I remembered.
"I haul," I said.
The clapping stopped.
Carlene's hand came down from her mouth.
"Mercy, there's no need for this," Josiah said, pleasant as ever, and lower. "The Bay stays with the Hall. The Crossing settled that."
"Then you had better hold it," I said.
I turned my back on him and walked to the doors.
At the visitors' table by the entrance, a big man in a canvas coat set down a glass he hadn't drunk from.
I had seen Armand Michaud three times that year, always at the far end of a room.
He was the Alpha of the Machias River drivers, and he had carried my father and my brother home from Vanceboro on spruce poles.
He had said to me at the funeral, "I'm sorry for your loss," and then nothing at all.
He did not stand up when I passed him.
He didn't look at me with pity either, and I noticed that, because every other face in that lodge did.
I pushed the doors open, and the sleet came in sideways.
The lot was a sheet of gravel and ice, and rows of trucks stood in it with their windows fogged.
I had no coat and no car.
The one truck I owned had sat in the Hall's shed for a year with a Thurston lock on it.
I had a buoy and my own two feet.
Behind me, the doors opened again.
Armand Michaud came down the steps with his coat over his arm.
He walked to a dark green pickup and did not look back at the Hall.
He was leaving, with me or without me.
Through the tall windows of the lodge, two hundred wolves were watching.
I wanted them to.
I crossed the gravel in the sleet and stopped in front of him.
He held out the coat, and I didn't take it.
I laid my palm flat on his chest instead.
His shirt was warm under my hand and his heart was going hard.
"Take me down the Airline tonight," I said. "And don't ask me why."
"I wasn't going to," he said.
I opened his truck door myself and got in.
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